Usually I can tell what mood I’m in based on who I like to tell my drama to. If I’m feeling really guilty I could call my mom and feel worse about everything or I could just go out with Tomek and find a way to feel better about it instead. That one summer, when I got really lucky with the lads and then ended up pregnant and felt like I could be those women wearing JC Penny’s dresses in a waiting room chair on a stage of a 90′s daytime talk show, like Jenny Jones, I was too scared to tell anyone what was going on, or so I thought. But how can anyone keep that secret? I ended up telling everyone what was going on, but only though a series of truths and untruths. This is what happened.
First, I told my lesbian friend who lives upstairs. We were out at Akbar in Silverlake. We went to the bathroom to do a bump of coke and all of a sudden she pulled out a tampon and told me, On the fucking dot again. She likes to call it, the dot and that’s one of the reasons why I love being around her. Usually her dot comes after mine so I got a little scared, and probably because of the devilish nose powder I was under a spell where I didn’t care who judged me, I just needed to figure out if I was pregnant or not in that second!
She totally understood, we drove back to the valley and went to the rite aid on the corner. I’d always stolen pregnancy tests in the past because one of my feminist friends from college discussed her idea of what should be free information or free supplies, i.e. condoms, pregnancy tests, pads & tampons. I would have just walked out with it if it was a Saturday morning and I looked like any other good girl in a summer dress who is buying birthday cards for grandma with my “not a plastic bag” tote filled with tampons or whatever I didn’t feel like paying for, BUT since I was a little high from that bump in the bathroom and maybe a little paranoid I felt like I should just buy the overpriced pee on me stick. It wouldn’t be worth getting caught stealing a pregnancy test at one in the morning with cocaine eyes.
Then we came home and I peed on it and it said I was pregnant and then it faded and said I wasn’t. That’s what I get for buying the cheap one. The night wasn’t wasted. We did some more coke, went on chat roulette and saw four dicks, talked with a few Turkish men, and a bearded fella wearing flannel in Washington who’s speaker didn’t work. Then in our deepened chattiness, my friend remembered hearing that parsley could induce a miscarriage. We googled it and spent a good hour laughing about it before we went to what felt like the only 24hour Ralph’s in the valley and bought some parsley.
I didn’t have cheese cloth like the blogs mentioned, so I just shoved it up there and hoped for the best.
Later, way later, when I’d almost forgotten I’d become one of those women who check that box at the gyno if she’s ever had an abortion, I told my younger sister about it. She called me freaking out that her high school boyfriend’s condom got stuck in her. She asked if it’d ever happened to me and it had. It happened when I was a first year in college and was seeing this bartender who only knew the me in my fake id. He said he couldn’t find the condom and I thought that meant it fell on the floor or something. Pulling out that parsley felt a lot like pulling out that condom. I felt ashamed. I decided to go ahead and tell her about the parsley just in case she needed a homeopathic remedy for pregnancy in the future. I thought she’d laugh because that’s all I wanted to do, but instead she seemed enthusiastic to have gained such knowledge. I could hear her googling it it just like I had done. I hoped that she would try the tea version and let me know if it actually made your period hurry up and arrive.
After three nights of shoving parsley up my vagina the only thing I was noticing was an oddly fresh breath in the mornings. I decided my call to Tomek was way overdue.
Tomek is my gay soul mate. He has read more self help books than anyone I know and he isn’t ashamed to tell anyone. Our relationship is based on love and acceptance and love and acceptance was just what a girl who is shoving parsley up her vagina needs. That and pot cookies. He stopped by the pharmacy and splurged on an eighth of shiska berry. Rule number nine in our rules to life is “If it’s shiska berry, you just have to.” So I figured whatever I’d have to do, it would just have to work. Overnight in the crock pot, hours of super Mario brothers, the one with Yoshi, and three dozen vegan sugar cookies fresh out of the over and we finally had a plan.
“Why not just ask all of the guys for the money? I bet one of them is bound to give you the cash. You know, I bet you could get enough to even pay rent.”
If it’s shiska berry, you just have to.
The first guy I went to ask was my ex-boyfriend. He’s Irish and I lived over there with him until I couldn’t handle the rain anymore and came back to LA. I loved being single so much that when months after the break up he decided to come win me back I told him not to come, that it’d be pointless. He didn’t believe me and came out anyway. He got a tan or I guess that’s the good thing that came out of that. We’d been broken up for over a year at that point, but we had this cycle of that every now and then booty call that would be so much fun we’d want to keep it up for at least a lover’s weekend, but it always ended with him storming out because I’d refuse to tell him those words he wanted to hear.
I was most suspicious of him because of his strong determination to “get me back”. On one of our lover’s weekends we drove out to see Hearst Castle and it was too rainy to go and we spent the weekend in the motel room drinking white wine spritzers instead. After the first bottle and before the sex I casually told him a story from high school about a girl from my fashion design class. It was just like the home economics class that people in places like Oklahoma had except that in Manhattan Beach they decided to call it fashion design and skip over the cooking and taking care of babies stuff. Well, I saw this girl pull out her little tomato-looking pin cushion and then a pack of condoms. She sat in the back near me where no one could really see us, but I could see her poke those holes like it was no big deal. I heard her say things like, “We’ll see if he wants to really take becky to prom after this.” My ex laughed at the story and said my teenage years were really funny compared to his milking cows on a farm experience. So then I casually told him, “Well, I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t going to try something like that.” Maybe because the wine loosened him up or something, but he didn’t get upset with me, instead he laughed and said he was no where near ready for a kid. I told him, “Well, I know you’re never going to be ready for an abortion, but I am… so don’t do it.”
I remembered that conversation while stuck in traffic on the 405. It wasn’t until I exited and ended up near that huge veteran cemetery that I remembered how that night I dreamed of demons, long black haired scary creatures who tried to suffocate me with their evil essence. I could feel a panic coming on so I reached for my purse to get a pot cookie. I smiled at the cops driving beside me as I chewed.
I decided I was on a need to know basis with my ex. He looked happy and maybe it was because I told him after my pot cookie kicked in and since I wasn’t freaking out he wasn’t sure what reaction to give me. He was one of those people who waits to see what sort of response someone might want before speaking. I call it “protecting feelings” and I hate having to be around people who expect that sort of thing.
I decided to leave when he raised his voice and said he’d never help me if that’s what I wanted to do and he’d never forgive me if I did it. He followed me to my car and opened the door in a way so that I couldn’t drive off without hurting him.
I simply told him, “Why would I ever want to be with a guy who’d side with his sperm over me? Please shut the door now.” He must have thought I was nuts, but I didn’t care, I had two more guys to talk to and needed to hit the road.
The second guy was this rich guy from Beverly Hills that I met on Craigs list. He liked to take me out to nice restaurants where I’d tell him all my funny stories and then we’d go our separate ways. I think he was just lonely and I was too so it worked out. One night we cured our loneliness by going all the way and I decided that I needed to sleep with more older men from then on out. He touched me in a way that made me appreciate my own beauty. I felt the way I felt when I worked as a nude model on summer and I’d look at the drawings after class and think, “Wow. I look good in charcoal.” It felt exactly like that and I didn’t even have a pot cookie or a cocktail with dinner that night.
When I told him the story I left out the part about my ex but I told him about the parsley because I thought it would be a good icebreaker. It wasn’t. He didn’t have the reaction I expected at all. Turns out before he was into dining with P.Y.T’s from Craigs list he had a wife who left him because she wanted kids and he wasn’t ready. “I could be ready now. I would take care of you and we could have a relationship if you want or we don’t have to if you don’t want.” I told him I’d go home and think about it. He told me that the parsley thing didn’t sound safe and not to try it again. I thought, “I’m OH FOR TWO, I better fucking try it again,” but I didn’t say that out loud. I took Beverly Glen back to the valley and listened to the XX and tried to silence all the thoughts in my mind.
The third guy was trickier to track down. He worked at the pharmacy but because the rules were all changing I wasn’t sure if my prescription would let me go to his shop and I didn’t even know his real name. I called him Skywalker because it was his favorite strain. Tomek recognized him while we were out one night and introduced us and I forgot his real name because when he gave me his number I put it in as Skywalker. A week of texting turned into sexting which turned into him practically living at my place until the dishes and laundry were so piled up that I got frustrated and kicked him out. If we lived in a different reality, one where we hired a maid, I could see myself being content just getting high and having sex and playing mario with him for quite some time.
I ended up stalking the place he worked that night. I told myself that it was creepy but I didn’t care. He was shocked and scared and I told him he could come over and we could just talk. He asked how I was feeling and what I wanted to do and if it’d ever happened to me before. I hadn’t expected him to be so nice. It was so comforting that when I realized that the other guys didn’t bother pretending to be concerned I didn’t really care. And that made me feel like maybe we could barter pot cookies for cleaning services or something.
We decided that the best thing to do was to have a pot cookie, order the pad see ew and green curry from Siam Cabin, and finally pass that forest of illusions level before we discussed anything.
I was the first to talk about it again. It was sort of abrupt. I just had to and it didn’t seem right to say it just as the joyful sounds of Luigi’s star power all the turtles and mushrooms started falling off the tv screen, but somehow, “I want an abortion,” just slipped out.
“Yeah, me too.”
We didn’t really talk much the rest of the night. He slept over and we really just slept. Even though it felt nice waking up with him, I still ended up listening to The Smiths after Skywalker left for work. I had just told three guys that I was pregnant in one day and still felt like nothing happened or changed. When “Half a Person” came on all I kept thinking was, maybe it is easier just to call up Maury to just figure it out for me.
